High Speed photography 101 - Pre-Smarter Every Day

Hey, it's me, Destin. It is late; the kids are in bed, so it's time to work on the next project. This time around, we're going to start trying to take photos of stuff being hit by bullets. I think that moment that they're hit by bullets is called high-speed photography—not like high-speed video like you've seen on TV, but it's really within the reach of most people. They just don't realize it. It doesn't take a lot of insanely special equipment; it's all timing.

What we're going to do is I've got a flash unit here. This is a real nice flash that my mom gave me for Christmas. She gives the best presents ever. But all we're going to do is create a circuit, or actually just put one together that's already created for us to flash this at the exact time we want to. It's really not that hard.

What I've got is a breadboard circuit that I bought just off the internet. I bought this one from High Viscom (HIV eyes EECOM), and I have what's called the multi-trigger. It can trigger things either on sound—which I'm going to use for my rifle shot—or you can do photo gates, things like that. So several different inputs, and then it'll put a delay on it. You can, you know, put twenty milliseconds, let's say, or two milliseconds, whatever delay you need, you can put on after the rifle shot so that the flash will go off right when the bullet hits the target. It's pretty cool, but it's not that hard.

So what I'm going to do is show you how long it takes to put together this circuit. I've got a—let's go engineer buddy—put it together for me already, but it's not got a lot of mechanical integrity right now. So I'm going to take his circuit back apart and put it back together so that's a little tighter. But you know, sorry, Sterling, you did a great job, I promise. This is what time it is now, and what's it—whatever. So we will see how long it takes me to take this apart and put it back together.

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Okay, I'm done. It is now this o'clock, whatever time that is. One comment off and get on my videos as, "Man, seems like you sure have a lot of free time!" I don't! I just don't sleep. So what we built—we have a circuit on a breadboard, and connected to the circuit is a piezo transducer, which is sensitive to sound.

So the way this particular circuit works is I'll turn my flash on here, and any sharp sound will initiate a flash just like that. You can adjust the sensitivity and the reset time and things like that. You can even put a delay from the point of the sharp sound until you want the flash to fire. You can input a delay time via a couple of potentiometers, a coarse and a fine potentiometer that you can adjust down and get whatever flash that you want. It's kind of fun how I do that.

Connect the flash to the circuit via what's called a PC connector. It's not personal computer; it's actually prompt or comp, which is a couple of flash companies from back in the 50s that standardized the connection to synchronize flashes to cameras over in the UK and Germany. So what do you do with this?

You can do several things. Let's say that you wanted to, oh, I'm going to take a picture of a bottle breaking, which is really hard to do if timing right. So you can get said bottle, and you can turn all the lights out, open the shutter, drop the bottle, and when the bottle hits the ground, you get a flash. That flash will expose the shutter—excuse me, expose the chip on your DSLR, and you get a really cool photo. It's pretty neat.

Another thing you can do is vary the output on your flash. This particular flash that I have has a built-in exposure compensation, so it'll quench the flash. There's a gentleman named Andrew that taught me how to do this—really, really cool. This particular flash, the minimum power output it'll do is 1/128 of a full output flash. I hooked it up to an oscilloscope, and that is about 160 microseconds duration, which is very, very short.

So you can achieve shutter speeds much faster than anything your mechanical shutter on your camera can do, which is awesome. The world was created with physical laws, and we are put here on this earth, and we have an opportunity to explore the world, explore creation within those physical laws. All the answers are already there; we just got to find them.

So that's what I like doing. So that's it. Anyway, have a good night or whatever.